The Fat of Fed Beasts by Guy Ware

Author:Guy Ware
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Salt Publishing Limited
Published: 2015-03-16T17:05:44+00:00

10

IT IS A long time since I went to bed so early. Or woke so early, for that matter, if it is early. Usually, when I go to bed, I let the radio trickle war and crisis and calamity and weather into my ear, and I am thankful for the distraction. I resist bed, I resist sleep, I resist the end of the day and the little death that follows because at night, when I have at least the illusion of choice, life seems like something it might be worth clinging on to, I don’t know why. It rarely appears that way in the morning. In the morning it is all up and at ‘em, shake a leg, the sun’s scorching your eyeballs out, shake a leg, shake a leg. It is Gary’s homemade muesli and D’s poptarts and little Matthew getting ready for school. I hear it all from my bed and I let them go. Rada means “hope”. She told me that, once, I think. Or Gary did. Anyway, it is more than I can bear in the morning.

The light here is thin, grey, like water you have washed dishes in. Crepuscular, I believe the word is. It is not capable of scorching my eyeballs. It must be morning, though, unless it is evening. How might I tell the difference? When I came here it was day. It was afternoon. I know that much. I believe it was Tuesday. And now it is day again. Unless it is the same day? No, I am certain that it has been dark, and now it is light. On the first day God divided the light from the dark. It must have been the first day. How could it have been otherwise? He had no choice, once he’d thought of it. That was his first mistake. It’s gone on much the same way ever since.

How do I know it’s early? There are no clocks here, no radio or television. When Kurt left he took my watch, and my mobile phone. If his name is Kurt – he did not deny it, but he did not confirm it, either. It is light, however, and I believe it was the light that woke me, thin as it is. There are no curtains or blinds here to mislead the senses. The window above the bed is barred and half-submerged; it is also filthy. But from the rear glass door that Kurt led me through last night (you see how these certainties build, one upon another, standing on the shoulders of giants?) and, better still, through the kitchen window beside it, I can see the garden full of weeds, although I cannot see the blue flowers, which must have closed, or died. Outside, there are no shadows, or perhaps it is all shadow. I can see the gnome. The little sky that I can see has no colour. Dawn, then, or thereabouts. And when I came here it was June, very nearly July. The solstice was not long past.

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